Trajva: Bodies, jewellery and the spaces in between

Bharti Parmar

Collection: Birmingham Museum Trust

Keywords: tattoos, jewellery, women, embroidery, India

The tortoise

In February 2023, I visited the Kutchh region of Gujarat, India, my ancestral state (fig.1). Located along India’s northwestern border with Pakistan, Kutchh is distinguished by its arid terrain of salt deserts that appear after the monsoon season. The region’s shape resembles a tortoise, known locally as કાચબો (katchbo), from which the name Kutchh is derived.

I was born in Yorkshire to a family who emigrated from Gujarat in response to the call for post-war labour, particularly in the textiles industry in the early 1960s. Reflecting on this personal history, in 2021 I was commissioned to exhibit at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery to mark Mahatma Gandhi’s 90th anniversary visit to East Lancashire in 1931 to witness first-hand the impact of India’s boycott of foreign goods on Blackburn millworkers [2]. The exhibition was called Khadi, a term which exploits the two meanings of the word: khadi = paper, khadi = cloth [3].

This exhibition comprised a number of works including a film entitled Khadi: Cotton, Colonialism and Resistance made in collaboration with award-winning Birmingham-based filmmaker Sima Gonsai. The film was shown again for the exhibition Cotton: Labour, Land and Body at the Crafts Council Gallery, London, in 2022, which caught the attention of the Living and Learning Design Centre (LLDC) in Gujarat, India, a groundbreaking museum which promotes the crafts heritage of Kutchh, who extended an invitation to me to visit [4].

Since my research centres cotton as material culture, I saw this as an opportunity to further explore ancestral landscapes and consider making a companion film about salt. I have never lived in India and my mind also raced at the prospect of encountering the extraordinary cultural produce of this place: metalwork, architecture, jewellery and embroidery.

Slow and steady wins the race… a consistent, patient, and persistent approach to a task is more effective for long-term success than rushing or acting hastily. 

The outdoor museum

I didn’t make a film about salt; I researched tattoos instead.

Kutchh is a region that has celebrated needlework for generations. In addition to needlework, Kutchh preserves another significant aspect of its cultural legacy: the body tattoo known as Trajva [5]. This traditional practice stands as a testament to the region’s enduring artistic spirit and the way in which cultural heritage is embodied and passed down.

I arrived late at night in the capital of Gujarat, Ahmedabad, to wait for the short connecting flight to Bhuj departing early in the morning. By the strangest coincidence, I bumped into Polly Leonard, editor of Selvedge, a leading UK textiles magazine, waiting with a group of western tourists for the same flight. They were on a textiles tour of the region with a scheduled stop at LLDC. Bhuj, the administrative city of Kutchh, is served by a small military airport and our flight on a tiny propellor-driven plane took us over salt plains and deserts.

My objective in Kutchh was to spend a number of days at LLDC Museum where I would live, eat and use as a research base. The museum helped me plan a week-long programme of field research on the practice of tattoos (fig.2). This topic came to light in conversations about embroidery symbolism and the cross-fertilisation of textile codes with those punched onto the skin of the female body [6].

Women who wear these tattoos live in small villages often culturally inaccessible to outsiders without a local escort, even to researchers who are Indian in origin. With unprecedented access granted by LLDC, I spent several days travelling to remote districts with my female Gujarati-speaking guide to meet tattooed women in their homes, their yards, their village squares – their space.

Off the beaten path…in or into an isolated place.

The stitch and the tattoo

My objectives were threefold: to advocate for the cultural tradition of vernacular tattoos in rural Gujarat; to explore the connections between symbolism, pattern and identity within the female Indian body; and to inform my studio practice through conceptualisation about mark-making and meaning.

To begin, I consulted a museum-based database in the library at LLDC on different regional sewing stitches of the local communities. Kutchh comprises numerous indigenous groups who retain their artisan traditions: Sodha, Mutwa, Jadeja, Dhebariya Rabaari, Ahirs and Jats, the latter pastoralists who migrated from Persia and Sindh, regions renowned for their fine embroidery work. The womenfolk of these communities typically wear colourful clothes often featuring intricate, handcrafted designs that indicate their societal and marital status as seen in the image above (fig.3) at a yearly gathering at LLDC to celebrate the late founder’s birthday.

I discovered a common vocabulary linking tattoo designs and embroidery patterns, both deeply intertwined with the cultures and environments of the communities in which they originated. In the LLDC digitised archives (fig.4), with my basic schoolgirl Gujarati language, I recognised the words daant, piparmatti and kanto. Daant, similar to the European root ‘dent’, means teeth, with the stitches having a fang-like resemblance; piparmatti, the hallmark stitch of the Kutchh region, is a circle-shaped raised chain often used to hold mirrorwork; and kanto means spike or thorn, evidenced in both the landscape and the aesthetic of the stitch [7].

These marks on cloth mirrored the marks on skin covered by cloth which I was about to observe on my field visits.

Cut from the same cloth… of the same nature, similar.

The symbol

My research questions on Trajva focused on the cultural origins of these tattoos, their symbolic significance and the techniques used to create them. The methodology included archival analysis at LLDC, ethnographic fieldwork involving travelling to villages for random sampling among regional communities such as the Ahir, Rabaari and their subgroups, and recording oral testimony and practical demonstrations of various tattooing techniques (fig.5).

My first and most inspiring visit was with Sariyaben, a greatly respected 69-year-old village elder from the Ahir group in the rural village of Dhaneti. She has worn a large ivory bangle, made from a cross-section of elephant tusk, from a young age; now tight on her wrist, it will never be removed (fig.6). She informed us that her tattoos had been ‘poked’ into her arms, hands, and feet when she was between 8 and 10 years old; she was married aged 12.

Her tattoos, as is common, are made from a system of dots to make a shape, pattern or word. Several dots make up a mark or a line; a line can’t be scored because it is too painful. Dots are made by piercing a sharp sewing needle (or acacia thorn) into the skin with a home-made ink of lamp soot mixed with liquid. This liquid is either the infusion of neem wood soaked for 2-4 days, or, if time is limited, the urine of a newborn baby boy under 6 days old or of a cow as an alternative. Water would cause infection, whereas urine or neem water is considered antiseptic. The soot is derived from the blackened underside of a tava (a chapatti griddle). Another recipe comprises coal dust, golaru leaves and oil, made into a paste [8].

A needle is made steady with a bajri husk (pearl millet) shield as a handle. It is pushed (or poked) into the skin until it breaks the surface and pressed deep to the point of bleeding; this is repeated up to three times per mark. Sweet nut oil is applied to the area in between needle insertions to soothe the wounded skin. Another solution to prevent the skin swelling is warm sand [9]. The skin’s blistering and peeling is evidence that the colour has taken. Sariyaben performed a live demonstration with black kajal and a glass rod to emulate the procedure, recounting that winter (November-March) is the preferable tattooing season to tattoo one another as infections are rarer in the cool weather [10].

Village women with various artisan skills, such as design and embroidery, come together as a group to enact the task upon one another. Sometimes, there would be a village tattooist who you would pay. Within these communities, the process of receiving tattoos was often a collective experience for young girls, with social dynamics playing a significant role.

On asking about the iconography of the tattoos, Sariyaben took my notebook and started recording patterns she could remember accompanied by their vernacular name (fig.7). My translator and I struggled to give them English equivalents. Popular tattoos included moons, scorpions, deities, inscriptions, grains and most commonly ‘abstract’ symbols comprising of dots. Their placement on the body ranged from simple dots on the face or neck resembling a necklace, and/or spreading across the body over the limbs, hands and feet (fig.8).

Dot to dot… a child's puzzle consisting of sequentially numbered dots which form a picture when connected with straight lines in the designated order.

The jewel

The central questions guiding this research of Trajva revolve around the extent to which these tattoos serve as jewellery. There is also the problem of preserving and recording this heritage practice, especially given the inherent challenge that, unlike portable jewellery, tattooed skin cannot be physically collected or passed down. This research also drew unexpected connections between Trajva and embodied forms of meaning in western jewellery.

Observing these dignified women brought to mind my doctoral research into Victorian sentimental jewellery, specifically the ways in which the human body was abstracted and transformed into wearable art. In particular, I recalled the tradition of hairworked jewellery – a practice that not only symbolised attachment and memory, but also blurred the boundary between the body and jewellery itself, much as tattoos are intimately linked to the wearer’s physical being.

The family tree of hair (fig.9) powerfully demonstrates how bodily matter can be used as sculptural material and, remarkably, as a means of describing a taxonomy of familial relations through the corporeal substance of the body itself.

Characteristic of many British civic museums, Birmingham Museum Trust’s Museum Collection Centre holds numerous Victorian hair items. These objects, carefully preserved within the collection, serve not only as artefacts of Victorian sentimental culture but also as tangible evidence of the era’s fascination with personal mementoes crafted from bodily material. The two supporting images: hairworked watch chains (fig.10), and various bangles and wrist articles (fig.11), either made from, or with hair as a major constituent, illustrate my interest in the circle shape.

The circle is central in jewellery; it is a void, a place to insert the body, or for the jewel to be enveloped by the body. In this way, the circle acts as both a container and a conduit, mediating the relationship between the jewel and the body. My studio mark, embossed on all my works on paper, comprises an ouroboros, a serpent chasing its tail representing infinity.

Recent works in the studio have incorporated the circle as a punched hole (fig.12). In the film still from Khadi: Cotton, Colonialism and Resistance (fig.13) I am punching holes of different shapes from Khadi paper (cotton paper made from reconstituted t-shirts), using dies and cutting tools to resemble Jacquard loom cards, an early form of digital weaving. The punching also references labour, the work of the hand, and the violence of Indian partition in 1947 when British India was divided into two independent dominion states, the Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan.

To come full circle… a situation, story, or process has returned to its starting point — often with new insight, growth, or transformation gained along the way.

The pain

A painful truth about Trajva is their use in 1947 as a weapon of war. Women were tattooed for a number of reasons, including rites of passage, means of community identification, for family members to claim them if separated, and as weapons of religious war, becoming permanent scars during partition.

In ‘Exploring the Different Tattoos of Partition’ Ahsun Zafar reveals interviews with individuals who recount memories of the tattoos their Hindu grandparents received. As children, these grandparents were hastily marked with an identifying OM symbol during the chaotic period of crossing newly drawn national borders, as families sought to reach the ‘right’ side [11].

In 1947, Muslims often used the crescent moon; Hindus marked their children with the ‘OM’ symbol; Sikhs with ‘Ek Onkar.’ Some chose to include more personal identifiers—initials, or simple images like a star or a bird. Not all survivors bear these marks, but for those who do, the faded ink remains a permanent trace of an unimaginable rupture.

Zafar believes this unspeakable trauma may explain the broader stigma of tattoos within South Asian cultures. There are also reports of forced identity whereby attackers tattooed women to humiliate them and brand them with the identity of the attacker’s community [12].

Pain associated with this practice is both emotional and physical. My interviewee Sariyaben stated that when she was married at 13 her unadorned feet were deemed ‘naked’, and she was required to tattoo them, but the tattooing hurt so much she stopped at one foot. When I enquired about the depth of the needle’s penetration during the procedure, I was told that the experience was so intense that girls often had to be physically restrained. Their cries were described as being so heartfelt and desperate, it was as if there was no tomorrow.

Sitaben (fig.14) a Rabari elder in Padhar village recalls that 35 years ago, she had up to 40 motifs on both legs and her neck for 60 rupees. She and a group of women pondered on my question on pain, resolving that the pain of tattoos was a suitable preparation for childbirth, and therefore an initiation process into motherhood.

Despite the considerable pain associated with traditional tattooing practices, girls and women continued to seek tattoos, motivated by their deep-rooted cultural customs. Typical beliefs include “my husband would not recognise me in the afterlife”, “my father-in-law would view my family as poor if I lacked tattoos” and “I am shielded from the evil eye”. Harkorba Saluji Rathod (62), elaborates, stating that “one dot on the chin ensures the doors of heaven will be open”, and that “a tattoo will travel with your soul at cremation, when the rest will not.” Sporting a tattoo of her late brother’s name on her left hand, she movingly shares that his name will not endure, as there is no next generation to carry it forward, marking the end of his male line in a profoundly personal and visible way. While physical goods like gold cannot be taken into the afterlife, the tattoos provide protection as armour, and are eternal.

A sacred cow… a belief or custom that is not to be questioned.

Faded memories

My field research targeted a group of women aged 60 and above within a 20-mile radius of Bhuj. Certain women, recognised by LLDC for their expertise and knowledge of traditional tattoo artforms, were singled out and contacted beforehand by telephone. Some women we came across by happenstance, as in this image above of Jiviben Rabari (60) (seated on floor far right) whom we met with her female kinfolk outside a rations store in the village of Lodai (fig.15). In this locale, the practice is almost exclusively reserved for females, but we did locate a man who entered our property on a bicycle on learning of our work, and showed us his tattoo. Comprising iconography deviating from the traditional norm of dots, his large tattoo of Lord Shiva playing a flute took up most of his forearm and was made with a machine, not a needle (fig.16).

Trajva is a fading cultural practice, with only a few tattooed women still living. Sariyaben tells us that the practice has dwindled since the late 1980s and girls don’t want them anymore. This, she believes, is due to number of factors: greater numbers of girls attending school, changing society and not least, the Bhuj earthquake in January 2000, which was seen as a reset for all things old and new [13]. Seated next to their 90-year-old great-grandmother, two young sisters confirm they have no interest in the old ways. Now there are tattoo machines, they might consider modern tattoos instead, but don’t have much appetite for those either.

A new generation of women within the diaspora is increasingly revisiting the ways in which their foremothers adorned themselves and tattoos are becoming a significant theme within migration narratives. The Desi Tattoo Collective is a curated Instagram-based directory which highlights and connects South Asian tattoo artists worldwide and aims to support the Desi creative community featuring diverse styles whilst countering cultural appropriation in the industry. Heleena, a renowned Leicester-based tattoo artist of Indian origin and its founder has is vociferous about cultural preservation and believes that tattooing traditional South Asian designs have helped her to reclaim her culture [14].

In recalling the tattoos of her great-grandmother, American artist Asha Sudra describes the physical fading of tattoos as ‘blowing out’:

The tattoos were mostly all dots and were blown out (tattooing term meaning blurred and spreading because of the deep impact from the needle during the process) [15].

Blowing out may also serve as a metaphor for how traditional tattooing is itself fading, signalling the gradual disappearance of this once widespread custom. What is crystal clear is that these motifs, deeply scored into community bodies and consciousness, hold a resonance that extends far beyond their individual visual elements.

Comfortable in one’s own skin… having a deep sense of self-acceptance, where you are happy with who you are without needing to pretend to be someone else.

Notes

[1] Also known as Godna in North and Central India, and Pachai Kuthal in Southern India.

[2] The exhibition Khadi was commissioned by SuperSlowWay and took place at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery from 1.10.21 to 8.12.21 archived at [https://britishtextilebiennial.co.uk/events/bharti-parmar-khadi/], accessed 19 April 2026.

[3] Khadi refers to Indian homespun cloth championed by Mahatma Gandhi as a part of the national movement for Swadeshi (economic self-sufficiency). It is also a thick watercolour paper comprising 100% cotton rag made by hand in India. I sourced Khadi paper from India made from recycled cotton t-shirts, and in its use as a material for drawing and sculpture, I highlight economic circuits of exchange, questions of value, cyclical journeys and the geographies that materials traverse through consumption, recycling and labour.

[4] The film and a number of drawings on khadi paper were further exhibited at Cotton: labour, land and body at Crafts Council Gallery London, curated by Uthra Rajgopal from 21.9.22 to 4.3.23 archived at [https://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/whats-on/cotton], accessed 19 April 2026. LLDC is a renowned museum and craft centre dedicated to preserving, promoting, and sustaining the traditional handicrafts of the Kutchh region. Founded by the Shrujan Trust in 2016, this 8-acre campus features extensive galleries showcasing 42 distinct Kutchi embroidery styles, live artisan demonstrations, craft studios, and a library, [https://shrujanlldc.org/], accessed 2 February 2026.

[5] Also known as chundra in Gujarat.

[6] These tattoos were poked or punched into the skin. Punching is a recurrent motif in my work: I punch marks and shapes into paper – with my hands often filmed, as a device to talk about both violence and resistance as in Khadi: Cotton, Colonialism and Resistance.

[7] As Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) is commonly known for the planting of acacia trees for the fast greening of barren land and for economic necessity as fuelwood. The artist duo Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser) explore another function of the widespread planting of acacia in The Salt Hedge [https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/salt-cosmologies], accessed 4 March 2026.

[8] Golaru most likely mispronunciation of Gular (ficus racemosa) a significant tree in India with medicinal antioxidant properties.

[9] As told by Harkorba Saluji Rathod (62) of the Sodha community group in a neighbouring village.

[10] Kajal is black organic material originally made from soot and oil applied to the eyes for decoration, make-up or to avert the evil eye.

[11] Ahsun Zafar, ‘Exploring the Different Tattoos of Partition’, Brown History, 8 March 2022, [https://open.substack.com/pub/brownhistory/p/exploring-the-different-tattoos-of].

[12] Monika Plaha, ‘Tattoos reveal the stories of the partition of British India’, 15 August 2022, [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-62542200], accessed 28 February 2026.

[13] On the earthquake, see [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12309791], accessed 4 March 2026.

[14] Rosalie Hurr, ‘Heleena on cultural appropriation in tattooing’, Things&Ink, 23 July 2020, [https://www.th-ink.co.uk/2020/07/23/heleena-on-cultural-appropriation-in-tattooing/], accessed 20 April 2026.

[15] Asha Sudra, ‘Resisting Colonial Erasure, Reclaiming Ancestral Tradition’, Brown History, 26 May 2022, [Resisting Colonial Erasure, Reclaiming Ancestral Traditions], accessed 20 April 2026.